Benjamin J. Balter recently opined that WordPress needs to start better expressing content in a machine readable format. Balter begins with an explanation of REST: “The idea is simple: a URL should uniquely identify the underlying data it represents. If I have a URL, I shouldn’t need anything else to view or otherwise manipulate the information behind it. WordPress, for the most part, does this well. Each post is given a unique permalink (e.g., 2012-12-15-why-wordpress…) that always points to that post. The problem is, however, in WordPress’s sense, it points to the display of that content, not the content itself. Read more

NUI Galway recently discussed the possibility of Galway becoming the European equivalent of Silicon Valley. According to an article out of the university, “Brendan Smith, Community Education and Outreach Officer for the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, was presented with the Science Person of the Year Award at the recent Galway Science and Technology Festival. He was given the award for delivering a range of pioneering science and technology learning initiatives to schools, colleges and to communities. Brendan Smith believes passionately that the city possesses many of the key ingredients needed to transform the region into a leading global hub for smart technologies’ innovation and development.” Read more

Some in the Semantic Technology community have pointed out that from a development perspective, Semantic Technologies are well suited for an agile approach to programming, and we will be discussing that idea more in future here at SemanticWeb.com. Today, however, we’re taking a look at some novel thoughts on agile development of a standard, thanks to guest contributor, Andreas Gebhard. He is Director, Editorial at Getty Images, and Board member of the IPTC.

We caught up with Gebhard at the recent Semantic Technology & Business Conference in New York, where he initially shared this idea with us.

He has expanded on these ideas in a post on the Getty Images blog. As Gebhard says, “I want to tell you the story of how we got there in just about a year — tremendously fast, in the world of standards.”

We re-print the post in its entirety below with thanks to the author and Getty Images.

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Saul Klein of the Guardian recently discussed the new age of the internet and the role that London could play in this period of innovation and development. Klein writes, “My career in the internet industry began in London in 1993 and if you had told me then that the UK would one day be the most advanced internet economy in the world, I would have questioned your sanity. But that is precisely what it is today. According to the Boston Consulting Group, by 2016, 3 billion people will be online and the internet economy will be worth $4.2tn among G20 countries – almost doubling in size since 2010. It’s a revolution which is rewiring every part of business and society, from SMEs to multi-nationals, not-for-profits to governments – and Britain is leading the way. In 2010, the internet accounted for more than 8% of UK GDP (a figure I’ll come back to), more than any other G20 nation, including the US (at 5.4%) and China (6.9%).” Read more

Jamillah Knowles of The Next Web recently explained why 2013 will be the year of the Internet of Things. Knowles writes, “This year’s Le Web event in Paris was based around the theme of the Internet of Things (IoT); the way in which objects around us will gather data and connect to controls or other machines via the Internet… There are still issues that need to be bashed out of course, proprietary technologies and closed data systems don’t do much to help things along. Privacy, security and networks are also in need of further consideration. However, products like the Fitbit or Fuelband are already becoming commonplace and makers are experimenting with remote systems like Lockitron for front doors and Growerbot for watering house plants.” Read more

Eric Little of Bio-ITWorld recently discussed how private cloud technologies can be used to improve semantic technologies. He writes, “While semantic technologies provide a sophisticated way of modeling complex relationships between data, the graphs that are created within semantic solutions can quickly grow to enormous sizes, given that they capture not only the elements contained within an enterprise’s raw data, but the added litany of related facts and relationships generated by automated reasoning, where 10-100 times as much new data can be generated from a single data source. As an example, imagine taking one’s raw assay data on a given compound, then linking it to all known data about related clinical studies and phenotypic effects, as well as underlying genomics data.” Read more

Bob DuCharme recently wrote on his blog, “I think I’ve figured it out… Here’s how to sell the Semantic Web and Linked Data visions to the Big Data folk: don’t. Sell them on RDF technology. The process of selling a set of technologies usually means selling a vision, getting people psyched about that vision, and then telling them about the technology that implements that vision. For RDF technology (by which I mean RDF, SPARQL, and optionally, RDFS and OWL), the vision for many years was the Semantic Web. Some people in that community eventually decided that an easier vision to sell was Linked Data. (Linked Data may not always include RDF technology—when Tim Berners-Lee added ‘(RDF*, SPARQL)’ to his list of Linked Data principles, it became the filioque controversy of the Linked Data community—but the boundaries of this or other sets of technologies I’m discussing are not the issue here. The point is, it’s very common to use the Linked Data vision to sell people on the value of using URIs, triples, and SPARQL together.)” Read more

Nick Barnes of Climate Code recently shared his vision for the future of Web Science. He writes, “The culture and practice of science is undergoing a revolution, driven by technological change. While most scientists are excited by the shifts and the opportunities they present, some are uneasy about the pace of change, and unclear about the destination: where is science going, and how will it help their own research. In this post, I will lay out my vision of twenty-first century science: the shape of future scientific practice, and in particular the future of scientific computation and data-processing.” Read more

Manu Sporny recently voiced his personal objection to the W3C microdata candidate recommendation. He writes, “The HTML Working Group at the W3C is currently trying to decide if they should transition the Microdata specification to the next stage in the standardization process. There has been a call for consensus to transition the spec to the Candidate Recommendation stage. From a standards perspective, this is a huge mistake and sends the wrong signal to Web developers everywhere. The problem is that we already have a set of specifications that are official W3C recommendations that do what Microdata does and more. RDFa 1.1 became an official W3C Recommendation last summer.”

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Big Graph Data Panelists (L to R): Mike Stonebraker, John Giannandrea, Bryan Thompson, Tim Berners- Lee, Frank van Harmelen

Last week, the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012) took place in Boston. It was an exciting week to learn about the advances of the Semantic Web and current applications.

The first two days, Sunday November 11 and Monday November 12, consisted of 18 workshops and 8 tutorials. The following three days (Tuesday November 13 – Thursday November 15) consisted of keynotes, presentation of academic and in-use papers, the Big Graph Data Panel and industry presentations. It is basically impossible to attend all the interesting presentations. Therefore, I am going to try my best to summarize and offer links to everything that I can.

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